Bethan Palmer FollowBethan is a Java developer and a Java Champion. She has spoken at conferences including JavaOne/Code One, DevFest and NetBeans days. She has a degree in English Literature.

My top 5 NetBeans IDE plugins

April 13, 2017 1 min read

Here at IDRsolutions most of us use NetBeans for Java development. There are loads of plugins you can get, so I thought it would be useful to list a few of my favourites. Some of these are plugins that I use on a daily basis, and there are others that I have seen demonstrated at conferences.

We use Checkstyle Beans to apply Checkstyle rules to our code base. The plugin will annotate code that breaks any of the rules by underlining it in yellow and adding a tag at the side. We use it to check we have whitespace in our code so that it’s clear and easy to read.

We have made our own NetBeans plugin, which can open PDFs in a JavaFX Viewer.

So those are my favourite NetBeans plugins. What are yours?

This post is part of our “NetBeans article Index” series. In these articles, we aim to explore NetBeans in different ways, from useful hint and tips, to our how-to’s, experiences and usage of the NetBeans IDE.

2 Replies to “My top 5 NetBeans IDE plugins”

Hey, I’m not an active dev. anymore currently, you seem so, so an (bit offtopic) question: Would you prefer netbeans over android studio for app development?

I tried netbeans once for webdevving, but when i loaded my htdocs folder in the tree view, it just crashed because it couldn’t handle ten-thousands of small html files, from one of my projects, must’ve been 2 or 3 y ago. Besides that i was very impressed with it, thats why i still follow it on Facebook, and stumbled upon your post :D. Have a lovely day.

Hi Bart,Personally I would use NetBeans with the NBAndroid plugin. One of the things I like best about NetBeans is that I can use it for all my different development projects without having to learn to use a new IDE each time.